Uber CEO announces new “cultural norms” for company after employee input: celebrate differences, do the right thing, act like owners, make big bold bets
and it looks a lot like Google and Amazon Sara Ashley O'Brien / CNNMoney : New from Uber: ‘We do the right thing. Period.’ Madison Malone Kircher / New York Magazine : Uber CEO Replaces Infamous Core Values With Friendlier-Sounding List Rob LeFebvre / Engadget : Uber CEO tries to rewrite corporate culture amid backlash Facebook: Jason Brown : Probably the coolest project I've worked on at Uber to date … Tweets: Nicole Cuellar / @nikolenka : Those are actually my coworkers and they answered a call for volunteers after ERGs raised a concern our imagery wasn't representative enough Jessica Guynn / @jguynn : And as always we ask: Who are the people in this photograph and how did Uber pitch them on lending their likeness to represent “diversity”? Jessica Guynn / @jguynn : Uber's new CEO appears to have dumped meritocracy as a cultural value and replaced it with “celebrating differences” http://www.linkedin.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement is the payoff line of a year-long arc: the February exposé based on interviews with 30+ current and former employees put Uber's unrestrained culture on the record alongside multiple harassment lawsuits, and the Covington & Burling report explicitly recommended 'reevaluated cultural values' among its fixes. Dara Khosrowshahi's new norms — celebrate differences, do the right thing, act like owners, make big bold bets — are the direct implementation of that recommendation, built with employee input rather than handed down.
The reception is already contested: social-media criticism has erupted over the replacement of 'meritocracy' and over imagery volunteers say wasn't representative enough, echoing the coverage that framed the old values as leaving employees drained. How the rewrite lands internally will shape whether it reads as reform or rebrand.
First-order effects
- Uber employees trade the infamous old core values for four new norms, and the company now has a codified answer to the board-level mandate from the Covington report.
- HR chief Liane Hornsey's culture-repair effort, described in her October interview, gains an official values framework to point to when recruiting and retention come up.
Second-order effects
- The public backlash over wording and imagery forces Uber into a second round of iteration on the rollout itself — ERGs and volunteer contributors become stakeholders in how the brand expresses the new norms.
- Rivals and recruiters can now benchmark against a softened Uber culture pitch, pressuring the company to show behavioral change rather than slogan change to keep credibility with candidates and investors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, post-scandal values rewrites become a standard governance instrument in tech: external investigations produce mandated culture documents, and CEOs own their communication — consistent with Khosrowshahi's later framing that the painful leaks 'started a real cultural change'.
- Culture statements shift from founder mythology to compliance artifacts, with boards and outside counsel effectively co-authoring what a company claims to believe.
The trend: Tech companies under regulatory and press scrutiny are converting scandal-driven investigations into officially rewritten cultural values, making culture reform a governed, iterative process rather than a one-time statement.